Trailer Talk - Mubarakan

The master of leave-your-brain-at-home comic capers Anees Bazmee returns to the box office after a two-year hiatus with Mubarakan. The film stars Arjun Kapoor, Anil Kapoor, Ileana D'Cruz and Athiya Shetty in leading roles and is one of the most spoken-about films of the year. The team recently released the theatrical trailer of the film at an event and sadly the film just looks like old wine in a new bottle.

Mubarakan is the story of the Singhs, particularly twin brothers Karan and Charan (Arjun Kapoor) and their loving chacha Kartar Singh (Anil Kapoor). Karan is your NRI dude from London while Charan is the quintessential sanskari desi boy. The boys are on a mission to find girls for themselves while Kartar Singh’s sole mission is to keep his nephews out of trouble. What follows is a series of goof-ups, running around and aimless dance numbers before the boys find the respective happy endings to their love stories. And in true Anees Bazmee style, there are a lot of random characters thrown in here and there just to increase the confusion and thereby the level of comedy; because in Bazmee universe, they’re directly proportional to each other! Sadly, promising talent like Ileana D’Cruz, Rahul Dev, Ratna Pathak Shah and fresh faces, namely Athiya Shetty, are all limited to playing fiddles to our two, oops, three leading men.

After an extremely mediocre performance in this year’s Half Girlfriend, Arjun Kapoor would really be hoping for the commercial success of Mubarakan to put him in the race of successful Gen-Y stars—a pack being led by the likes of Varun and Sidharth. Bazmee would also be relying heavily on Mubarakan as his last venture, Welcome Back, even after being a box office success, failed to impress the audiences on the whole. Athiya Shetty will be praying that the film gets the kind of commercial success that she would’ve wanted from her debut film Hero. The only saving grace of the trailer for us was Anil Kapoor. The actor who’s been busy with his TV show 24 returns to the big screen after a gap of two years and we think there couldn’t have been a better way to arrive again. Kapoor seems to have hit the bull’s eye with the character, impressing us with his zeal and charm. His impeccable comic timing when he tells Arjun Kapoor "let's keep this matter within us, the youth" – had us rolling on the floor laughing. He clearly steals the thunder from Arjun!

Even though 28 July would be a busy Friday at the box-office, Mubarakan will enjoy an almost solo run as it is the only mainstream commercial film amongst Lipstick Under My Burkha, Indu Sarkar and Raag Desh, all of which release on the same day. Can one of these smaller films spring a surprise or will Mubarakan cross the box-office window as the front runner? We’ll have to wait to find that out! In the meanwhile, watch the trailer below:

Produced by Sony Pictures Network Produtions, Mubarakan releases worldwide on 28 July 2017.